I don’t want to talk down to someone as intelligent and experienced as YJ Fischer, but she does seem to miss the gorilla in the room. In her column for CNN, she rightfully sounds the alarm about President Trump’s expressed willingness to pull all of our troops out of South Korea, and she notes that this would be a huge boon to China and North Korea as well as a great danger for South Korea and Japan. She might have noted, however, that the Korean War started when Joseph Stalin gave his blessing. Originally, the idea was that tying American troops down in the Far East would give Russia a freer hand in Europe and a stronger alliance with China. That logic has been inoperative for decades, and what Russia, China, and North Korea would like to see now is an American retreat back home across the Pacific Ocean.
As Fischer notes, Trump began questioning America’s presence in the Far East during the campaign. And just prior to the Winter Olympics, there was a flare-up between the president and his chief of staff John Kelly over Trump’s insistence that we unilaterally withdraw from the Korean peninsula without any cause, concessions or consultations with our allies. According to the New York Times, Trump has now ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for withdrawing our troops, an idea so unsupported in the administration that National Security Adviser John Bolton called it “utter nonsense” and said “the President has not asked the Pentagon to provide options for reducing American forces stationed in South Korea.”
In many ways, this bizarre behavior has been mirrored in Syria. During the campaign, Trump explicitly said that he felt we should leave Syria to the Russians and that Putin’s only concern there was fighting ISIS which seemed like a fine idea. As in South Korea, Trump recently caused an internal uproar when he suddenly called for the immediate withdrawal of all American troops from Syria. Much of this history was immediately forgotten after the subsequent chemical attack in the Damascus suburbs, but I wrote about it at the time: As He Promised, Trump Will Gift Syria to Putin.
Here’s a taste of how things went down in the Situation Room:
Trump’s desire for a rapid withdrawal [from Syria] faced unanimous opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence community, all of which argued that keeping the 2,000 U.S. soldiers currently in Syria is key to ensuring the Islamic State does not reconstitute itself.
But as they huddled in the Situation Room, the president was vocal and vehement in insisting that the withdrawal be completed quickly if not immediately, according to five administration officials briefed on Tuesday’s White House meeting of Trump and his top aides…
…Documents presented to the president included several pages of possibilities for staying in, but only a brief description of an option for full withdrawal that emphasized significant risks and downsides, including the likelihood that Iran and Russia would take advantage of a U.S. vacuum.
Ultimately, Trump chose that option anyway.
This decision has been delayed in the aftermath of the chemical attacks, but it shows that Trump is as interested in doing Russia’s bidding in Syria as he is in Korea. It’s consistent with Trump’s approval of and promise to recognize the annexation of Crimea, his attacks on an “obsolete” NATO, his attacks on the European Union, his celebration of the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom that the Russians also supported, his refusal to accept the consensus of his intelligence community that Russia was behind the hacks and worked to help him in his election, and his reluctance to issue sanctions against Russia and his fury about their severity.
It’s consistent with his decision recently to countermand Russian sanctions that had been announced by UN Ambassador Nikki Haley.
President Trump was watching television on Sunday when he saw Nikki R. Haley, his ambassador to the United Nations, announce that he would impose fresh sanctions on Russia. The president grew angry, according to an official informed about the moment. As far as he was concerned, he had decided no such thing.
There’s really nothing subtle about these moves. Trump isn’t about subtlety. The day after he fired James Comey, he invited Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak into the Oval Office and told them that he had been under great pressure in the Russia investigation but that it was now resolved: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job.” Then he showed them sensitive intelligence about Syria that had been provided by the Israelis. It was the exact kind of thing the Israelis had been worried about:
In January [2017], it was reported that Israeli intelligence officials were concerned that the exposure of classified information to their American counterparts in the Trump administration could lead to it being leaked to Russia and onward to Iran. The intelligence concerns, which had been discussed in closed forums, were based on suspicions of ties between Trump, or his associates, and the government of Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
Given the cumulative evidence, do we not have the right to suspect that Trump’s motives in wanting to pull our troops out of Korea don’t have anything to do with saving money or enhancing our national security? Does it not seem more likely that Trump is engaged everywhere in actions that will benefit Russia?
Pulling out of the Paris Climate deal helps oil-producing states like Russia while decimating America’s moral standing in the world. Breaking America’s commitment to the Iranian Nuclear Deal creates the worst rift in the Trans-Atlantic alliance in its entire history and leaves Europe isolated and more Russia-dependent than ever. If Vladimir Putin were in the White House instead of Trump, he would make these same decisions but he wouldn’t get away with such obvious sabotage.
And, yet, we have David Brooks telling us that Trump is perhaps governing like a true gangster.
If not for the Trump and [Michael] Cohen peer circle, white-collar prisons would be sitting empty. And this all happened before Trump and Cohen elevated their moral associations even higher by entangling with Russian oligarchs.
And yet I can’t help but wonder if that kind of background has provided a decent education for dealing with the sort of hopped-up mobsters running parts of the world today. There is growing reason to believe that Donald Trump understands the thug mind a whole lot better than the people who attended our prestigious Foreign Service academies.
The first piece of evidence is North Korea. When Trump was trading crude, back-alley swipes with “Little Rocket Man,” Kim Jong-un, about whose nuclear button was bigger, it sounded as if we were heading for a nuclear holocaust led by a pair of overgrown prepubescents.
In fact, Trump’s bellicosity seems to have worked. It’s impossible to know how things will pan out, but the situation with North Korea today is a lot better than it was six months ago. Hostages are being released, talks are being held. There seems to be a chance for progress unfelt in years.
Maybe Trump intuited something about the sorts of people who run the North Korean regime that others missed.
It’s hard to describe the obliviousness of this analysis. Trump had to be shouted down by his chief of staff to prevent him from ordering the removal of our troops from the Korean peninsula prior to us getting any concessions or hostages back from North Korea. Is it any surprise that the North Koreans have responded to this with conciliatory actions? Their fondest hope is within reach and was nearly reached without them having to lift a finger. Why make trouble for the president when he’s trying to surrender?
To be clear, there are arguments that can be made against America having a large military presence around the globe, including in Korea and Syria, but Trump no more articulates these arguments than he understands them. He doesn’t have some informed and accurate rationale for what he says about Brexit or the European Union or NATO or Crimea. What he says is what Vladimir Putin would want him to say. That’s the only thing that is consistent in all of this.
The US elite foreign policy establishment doesn’t have a good record in recent years and just because they think Trump is out of his mind doesn’t mean that they’re the smartest or wisest people to be running our country. I’ve spent most of the last twenty years blasting away at how we have conducted the war on terror, and my critiques of America’s economic imperialism go back much further than that. Trump is sometimes right in the same way that a broken clock is right. For that matter, some of Russia’s critiques and complaints about U.S. policy have some merit to them.
But as dissatisfied with the people who have been running our country as I am, I am completely appalled to see our country taken over by a kleptocratic assassin like Vladimir Putin. His values and his foreign policies can never be our values and our foreign policies.
And, yet, this is exactly what we’re seeing happen right in front of our eyes.
The problem is compounded by the fact that this is so shocking and hard to accept that even knowledgable critics have a hard time facing up to it. So we get critiques like the ones above from YJ Fischer and David Brooks. They have wildly divergent takes on what we’re seeing in North Korea but where they agree is in missing the real story.
Trump isn’t some masterful thug negotiator nor is he ready to give away the store in return of anything of actual value. He’s just anxious to give away the store.
Planet Earth is not our store … exceptionalism?
Booman isn’t talking about the whole of Planet Earth … the Aristocrats?
True. If the whole world was our store a lot fewer Russian journalists would get thrown out of windows.
But this is actual analysis. If you’re a smart person with a non-interventionist mindset like Glenn Greenwald, you’d argue this like a child:
“Russia opposes Trump’s violation of Iran Deal, just as it opposed so much of what he’s done (bombing Assad, arming Ukraine, sanctioning Russians, etc.). The governments to which Trump is *actually loyal & subservient are Israel & Saudis, but this doesn’t help Dems’ 2016 narrative”
Treasury hasn’t actually put in place those Russian sanctions, but when you have to push your own narrative, what’s a few cherrypicked facts?
Is the rise of a Trump-like political party the inevitable result of the decades-long failure of our elites?
We (broadly speaking) are elevating those same elites as the best defense against Trump’s party. Many of those elite overtly fostered that party’s rise and most others supported the failures that, arguably, prepared the ground. Anyone who too-loudly opposed those failures found themselves outside of the charmed circle of ‘elites.’
How do we act to not only minimize the danger of this current hellish political moment, but also in the future to keep this from happening again? Martin is far more sophisticated and knowledgeable than I am about this stuff, but I’ve been reading about the imminent collapse of the Republican Party here for what, six years? Instead, it mutated into something even worse.
I just don’t know how we’re supposed to address this problem, in the long or medium term.
You write:
Booman speaks of his longstanding opposition to American imperialism.
Trump appeals to American isolationism, not to anti-imperialism.
And his interest in American isolationism is that it is in the geopolitical interests of Russia, because what’s good for Russia is good for Trump.
So those American imperialist elites are fighting Trump’s party. Or some of them are, anyway.
Ever wonder what Henry Kissinger thinks of Trump?
Tweet from Adam Jentleson (don’t know how to embed these things, sorry)
Ok everyone time for some game theory that’ll advance a unified explanation of the entire universe of Trump/Russia/Collusion/Stormy D/Emoluments/Corruption scandals – if you can manage to stick with me.
Ready?
Buckle up, here we go:
Trump doesn’t have any money.
did you really just call David Brooks a “knowledgable critic”?
The writers you refer to agree in missing the real story not because anything is wrong with them, but because their employers WANT the people to be misinformed.
Well, you have certainly detailed an alarming confluence of foreign policy “positions” taken by Der Trumper, but there is always the question of whether the man is smart enough to have such a coherent view of the world. He doesn’t seem like too much of a chess master, haha.
The Prussia of the 21st Century spends well over a trillion dollars a year on its wasteful bloated military in the guise of “national defense”. This has long since passed being an abuse both at home and abroad. Having said that, Korea may be one of the last places on earth that having a large concentration of conventional military forces makes continued sense. But one does have to ask the question: what would the end of the Korean War look like to a sane administration? Is the corps of American soldiers to be there for 100 years? 200? Obviously Kim listened to Der Trumper’s campaign yapping about pulling the troops out of Korea and took him at his word. Certainly he wasn’t terrified by Trumper’s taunts and pronouncements of bellicosity.
As a product of distant parents, organized crime and reality TV, our deranged political criminal looks for grifting, glory and “ratings”. Fantasies of (the greatest!!) TV ratings literally obsess him. Imagining that HE ended the Korean War has obviously become a major attraction for his vanity. Accomplishing the “unprecedented!” is what tempts his Id, and there certainly is a risk that he gives away the Pacific store to make it happen.
I’m inclined to see a complete retreat in Korea as more a benefit to China than anything, which is comical given Trumper’s apparent antipathy. But it’s surely true that Trumper has no vision of foreign policy that doesn’t also make Putin smile. However, the American Rightwing also says that any reduction of the money poured down America’s militarist rat-hole makes Putin smile. Under Trumper, the Rightwing lauds Putin AND pours even more money down the rat-hole, kind of a worse case scenario! It is incoherent to increase military spending while “retreating” on every front.
Obviously such a long standing major military commitment as Korea could only be prudently ended with the advice and consent of our allies in the region, South Korea especially. Der Trumper fantasizes that it’s his decision to make unilaterally, since he is the CEO of FailedNation, Inc., after all. A democratically illegitimate prez thinks he has the power to change the face of the globe based on personal whims and the Fox and Friends knowledge base of a money launderer for Russian oligarchs. That’s the real problem.
My single problem with this is that Trump is a flat line when it comes to depth of knowledge regarding any kind of foreign policy so it’s hard to see any kind of strategy. Of course there’s always the glaringly obvious reasons he might be working under which have nothing to do with foreign policy and everything to do with thinking if he brings everything home his base will take care of the midterms.
Fox is the logical driver of his positions, so is Putin pulling their strings as well? Putin seems to be everywhere with a finger in everyone’s pie.
I find myself from time to time posting in ways that seem obsequious, Booman, because you can be so frickin brilliant and your analysis is so often spot on like a laser. This is one of those times.
I’ve seen you piss people off for no reason. Sometimes you’ve pissed me off and scratched my head around why whatever I’d said had offended you. I’ve also seen you strut and crow about your own brilliance in a way that’s unnecessary and, frankly, unhelpful. For a long time I wondered why you didn’t have more of a national following but ultimately concluded it was most likely due to stuff like that. Basic insecurity that comes through in unhelpful and alienating ways. But no one on the national scene is more spot on insightful than you, and I say that even though these observations are there to be had by anyone as the behavior is right out in the open — and most of the people here already get it. Still, you sum it up better than anyone else could. You put your finger on what’s happening and write about it with an articulateness and capacity to make things seem obvious (because they should be obvious) that no one can match.
We need your voice on the national stage. I hope you find your way there. It’s where you should be.
Russia probably explains everything about Murdoch as well.
“… she does seem to miss the gorilla in the room.”
What’s even more amazing, the 800-pound elephant walked right by her.
coming soon: “that rusher thing: the epilogue” ….
“If Vladimir Putin were in the White House instead of Trump, he would make these same decisions but he wouldn’t get away with such obvious sabotage.”
Well, effectively, Putin IS in the White House and “he” IS (so far) getting away with this obvious sabotage. And here’s why:
“The problem is compounded by the fact that this is so shocking and hard to accept that even knowledgeable critics have a hard time facing up to it.”
As a nation, and particularly our institutions and leaders, we historically have had an aversion to facing up to obvious, ugly truths. And its rooted in this inability to own up to the fact that we are not as exceptional, special or better than other nations or peoples as we like to believe. We want to believe it, and for that reason we cannot acknowledge these facts that say otherwise. Nothing matters more than the belief that “we” are “better.” Its “hating America” to say otherwise.
For centuries we have worked hard and effectively to ignore the hypocrisy that our nation, founded on freedom based on the idea that all men are created as equals, was rooted in slavery. We have pretended our “democratic experiment” to be pristine and unassailable when for most of our history the vote was restricted to white men. We claim righteous justification for “American Exceptionalism” when in reality it has been a very ugly face of hegemony to those on the business end of it. And we have a two tiered system of justice that treats those with wealth far different then those without, and non-white people far different still. The response to Black Lives Matter is but one example of the ferocious response to calls to address the gaps in the justice system. Racism obviously thrives and yet our leaders respond with shopworn platitudes (we’ve come a long way!) designed to silence and shut down any honest discussion. And our institutions continue to pretend and treat in the public sphere these situations or their respective histories as “matters of opinion” intended to shut down honest examination, and then respond with over the top anger and high dudgeon when pressed with the facts that say otherwise.
Its that way with Trump. Even so called “liberal media” has an aversion to reporting the collective meaning of the volume of facts of Trump’s corruption and treason for fear of having to address the ugly truth of the matter. There are no latter day Cronkites on “our side.” They say “we’re in uncharted waters.” That might be true if we didn’t have mechanisms for addressing it, and we clearly do. But that’s the very reason that is said, to pretend that there is nothing we can do. Its cowardice born of corruption.
So of course, that we have a President who is clearly a traitor (that’s what the right would call him were the situation reversed, and they wouldn’t be wrong) cannot be said without being tarred as the rantings of “someone with an agenda”, or a crazy person. Or, as a democrat/progressive, saying such things undermines our chances to win (WTF for then!) back the delusionals who’d never vote with them anyway.
Back in the day it was said America is a “can do” nation, and in some respects it was. Eric Holder couldn’t have said it better: we are a nation of cowards afraid to face up to hard truths. Which explains “Putin” effectively in the White House.
“Pulling out of the Paris Climate deal helps oil-producing states like Russia…”
We are an oil producing state as well. We are the #3 producer and produce more than Iraq (#4) and Iran (#5) combined. Russia and Saudi Arabia are usually referred to as super petrol states, but we produce roughly 85% of their output.
Don’t read Brooks, as he is not worth the time, and your physician will thank me in a decade. He is always trying to normalize the radical actions of the current Republicans. That is all he ever does, there is never any real analysis, nor honest thought. He is like Mr. Rogers welcoming fascism to the neighborhood like it is an exotic cuisine that your palette will adjust to over time. Just check your brain at the door and accept that Mr. Magoo will land our plane safely with his unorthodox approach.
. . . of current politics.